Beyond Baroque

honoring

Eloise Klein Healy and

Mike Sonkson

3rd Annual George Drury Smith Awards DinnerSunday, July 14, 2013 at The Church in Ocean Park

Beyond BaroqueGoverning Board:

Doug KnottPresident

Richard ModianoExecutive Director

Iris Berry

Laurel Ann Bogen

Eve Brandsetin

Liz Camfiord

Larry Colker

Nancy Fulton

Bill Hickok

Melody Kellogg

Doug Knott

Suzanne Lummis

Richard Modiano

Henry Morro

Greg Orloff

Gloria Vando

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center • 681 Venice Blvd, Venice CA 92091Office: 310.822.3006 • Fax: 310.827.7432 • www.beyondbaroque.org

One year ago Wanda Coleman was honored with the George Drury Smith Award atBeyond Baroque's Second Annual Awards Dinner. The award was presented by the sameGeorge Drury Smith who founded Beyond Baroque 45 years ago. Tonight, Wanda herselfwill be presenting the award named after George to the amazing poet and teacher EloiseKlein Healy, who was recently appointed LA’s official poet laureate.

Wanda has often been called "the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles," so it isappropriate that the award passes through her hands to Los Angeles’s first official poetlaureate. Beyond Baroque is proud to call both women friends and supporters.

Amelie Frank, last year's recipient of our Distinguished Service Award, is here tonight topresent that honor to this year's richly deserving recipient, Mike (the Poet) Sonksen, whohas given so much of himself to Beyond Baroque and the Los Angeles poetry community.Mike is a shining example of volunteerism that we should all strive to follow.

Clearly, Beyond Baroque is more than an institution and a building. It represents traditionand continuity for Los Angeles’ arts community. Our free Wednesday Night PoetryWorkshop has been meeting continuously for over four decades, and our archives holdsome 40,000 volumes that represent a venerable history of L.A.-born literature. Tonight'sevent builds on that history. It also promises a future of expanding services to poets,writers and lovers of the written and spoken word.

With your support and the support of corporate and community grants, Beyond Baroque ishappy to be able to continue its movement toward making the landscaping around the oldCity Hall building, where it is housed, water wise, drought tolerant, and ocean friendlythrough the grant it has received from the Keep Los Angeles Beautiful Foundation. Theproject will also support the green policies of the City of Los Angeles, which owns thebuilding and grounds that houses Beyond Baroque. Thanks to the generosity of the MikeKelley Foundation for the Arts we continue to exhibit exciting artworks by up and comingas well as established artists, in our upstairs Mike Kelley Gallery.

George Drury Smith dreamed Beyond Baroque into being, and the dream continues to grow.

We're deeply grateful to tonight's honorees, to the award presenters, to our entertainer, DanNavarro, and to all who helped produce this event. And we offer special thanks to all ourattendees tonight. You help make Beyond Baroque possible. Our doors and hearts are opento you always.

Sincerely,

Richard Modiano Doug KnottDirector Board President

@BBLitArts

Spec

ialT

hank

sThe Board at Beyond Baroque would like to

thank the following people and groups:

Beyond BaroqueSupporters:

The Abbott Kinney FoundationThe Annenberg Foundation

The Beall Family FoundationThe James Irvine FoundationKeep Los Angeles Beautiful

The Los Angeles Departmentof Cultural Affairs

The Los Angeles County Arts CommissionMike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Walter Mortensen and Perceval Press

National Endowment for the HumanitiesRaymond Pettibon

Poets & WritersCouncilman Bill Rosendahl

Ed Ruscha

The Staff and Volunteersat Beyond Baroque

Carlye ArchibequeJim Fleck

Laurel HaranEllyn MaybeQuentin Ring

Awards Dinner Donors:Eve Brandstein

Meredith GordonGloria Vando & Bill Hickok

Special Guests:Wanda Coleman

Brendan ConstantineAmélie FrankDan Navarro

Awards DinnerVolunteers:

Iris BerryMeredith GordonMelody Kellogg

Ellyn MaybeJudy Pinkster

Lonnie McComb

Awards DinnerCommittee:

Sherman PearlNancy FultonGloria VandoBB liasions:

Richard ModianoCarlye Archibeque

Raffle Prize Donors:Johanna Ingalls/Akashic Books

Gloria Vando/Helicon Nine EditionsLiz Camfiord/Penguin Classics

Kate Gale/Red Hen Press

Hon

oree

Mike SonksenMike Sonksen, also known as, Mike the Poet, is a 3rd-generation LA native acclaimed for

poetry performances, published articles and poetic city tours. He graduated from the Universityof California Los Angeles and is finishing an advanced degree at California State UniversityLos Angeles. Sonksen has lectured at and had his book, I AM ALIVE IN LOS ANGELES!

added to the curriculum of over 60 universities and high schools.

In 1997, Sonksen was the first undergraduate ever published in “Critical Planning,” theUCLA School of Urban Planning’s annual academic journal. Sonksen studied with City of

Quartz author, Mike Davis and distinguished Urban Planning Professor, Brian Taylor while atUCLA before graduating. Following graduation, Sonksen’s led city tours for the Museum of

Neon Art, Museum of Architecture & Design and Craft & Folk Art Museum. Combiningpoetry and history, his unique tours were covered in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA

Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Flavorpill and Daily Trojan. Sonksen's published prose has beenin Poets & Writers, Wax Poetics, Los Angeles Review of Books, LA Weekly, OC Weekly, LA

Alternative Press, Big Bridge and countless others. His weekly KCET column "LA Letters"celebrates brightmoments from literary Los Angeles.

LA Times Book Review Editor Steve Wasserman selected Sonksen to perform his poem “LAAuthors” as the finale to the 2001 LA Times Book Prizes. Sonksen performed at the NorthBeach Jazz Festival, The Roxy, Viper Room, The Echo, Hotel Café, Stella Adler Theater,

The Standard Hotel, the Beat Museum, the Association of Writing Programs (AWP) annualconference in Chicago in 2012 and for Landscape Architecture Students at Cal Poly Pomona

among many others. Sonksen’s poems have aired on KCRW, KPFK, KPFA and KXLU.

Sonksen has mentored hundreds of young writers in his classes, poetry workshops, 15 yearsof producing literary events and in the several literary magazines and websites he’s served asan editor. Sonksen taught at View Park Preparatory Accelerated Charter High School in theCrenshaw District where he was voted “Most Inspirational Teacher.” Several of his students

wonwriting competitions through the Department of Cultural Affairs

Beyond BaroqueDistinguished Service Award

Hon

oree

Eloise Klein HealyEloise Klein Healy is the author of Building Some Changes (Beyond Baroque Foundation New Book

Award), A Packet Beating Like A Heart (Books of a Feather Press), Ordinary Wisdom (Paradise Press /reissued by Red Hen Press), Women’s Studies Chronicles (The Inevitable Press Chapbook Series),

Artemis In Echo Park (Firebrand Books), Passing (Red Hen Press), The Islands Project: Poems ForSappho (Red Hen Press), A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings (Red Hen Press),

and three spoken word compilations.

Born in El Paso, Texas, Eloise Klein Healy grew up in rural Iowa. Healy's crisp, image-and narrative-driven poems often explore community, sexuality, and the nature of home. On the radio program

Writers on Writing, Healy discussed her work’s attention to “the influence of place on people.”Addressing the role of the open-air California landscape and the details of daily life that often ground

her poems, Healy noted, “The way you are in the world is also the way you are in your head.”

As an editor, Healy is also active in the world of small-press publishing. She co-founded ECO-ARTS, aventure combining ecotourism and the arts, and in 2006 established Arktoi Books, an imprint with Red

Hen Press specializing in the work of lesbian writers. Healy has taught at California State UniversityNorthridge, where she directed the Women’s Studies Program, and at the Feminist Studio Workshop in

the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. She was the founding chair of the MFA program at AntiochUniversity Los Angeles, where she won the inaugural Horace Mann Award.

Healy’s work has been frequently anthologized in collections such as Another City: Writing From LosAngeles; California Poetry: From The Gold Rush To The Present; Grand Passion: Poets of Los Angeles

and Beyond; The Geography Of Home: California’s Poetry of Place; and The World In Us: Lesbianand Gay Poetry of the Next Wave.

She has been awarded residencies at The MacDowell Colony and Dorland Arts Colony, fellowshipsfrom The California Arts Council and California State University Northridge, and a COLA Fellowship

from the City of Los Angeles. In 2012, Healy was appointed Los Angeles’s first poet laureateby Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

George Drury Smith Award

Foun

der

George Drury SmithIn 1964, George Drury Smith had just moved to Venice Beach, California from San Francisco. He cameto the artsy Los Angeles beach community hoping to connect with other writers in the Beat Movement

but was disappointed to find that the scene was dying down and the public spaces, like John Haag’sVenice West Café, that hosted the Beats and their performances, were also coming to an end. Smith

forged ahead despite the waning of an active beat movement in Venice by creating a magazine, whichhe could not actually publish until 1968. He called it Beyond Baroque and was hoping to attract

like-minded writers to share and collaborate with in the creation of art. Almost forty-five years later,Beyond Baroque has grown into the only literary arts center of its kind in Los Angeles, and as such, itcontinues to serve a community of writers, musicians and artists with a robust monthly schedule of artopenings, poetry readings, avant garde music, independent film screenings and in-house publications.

The name, Beyond Baroque, came to Smith one night. “I had been reading a lot of Spanish Baroquepoetry," he says, "and was hoping to see a late 20th century ‘re-nascence’ in the world of poetry, not areturn to traditional forms but rather a return to writing with more attention to sound, rhythm, allitera-

tion, internal and near rhyme, even anagrams. The traditional poetic devices but not the traditional rigidforms and scansion.” Founded with this unique artistic vision, Beyond Baroque became a body inmotion and has been on the move every since. In 1972, the body became a non-profit foundation.

George Drury Smith was chosen by Beyond Baroque’s governing board as a way to honor its rootsand the man who planted them, but while Smith says he is honored with the selection, he is also a bit

embarrassed and doesn’t claim any but the most basic credit for the organization's success. “Whathappened at Beyond Baroque and what Beyond Baroque became were not part of my vision; ratherthey were the result of the coming together of a lot of creative people who needed an outlet for their

work -- publication and a space in which they could perform, learn and share. That is what I providedinitially. But without the help of Jim Krusoe and the late Alexandra Garrett we wouldn’t have made it

through the first few years, and scores of other devoted people have since helped preserve the space andbreathe life into it.” Smith's secret for keeping a level head about his contribution to the literary arts

community? “My view of life is that you need to have worthy goals and do the footwork for what youbelieve in, then accept what you get -- go with the flow. If you're too rigid, you fail.”

Beyond Baroque Founder

Photo by Kathryn Jacobi

Prog

ram

6:00Cocktails

6:30Opening remarks from Beyond Baroque

President, Doug Knott

6:45Dinner

7:30Remarks from Master of Ceremonies

Brendan Constantine

Entertainment by Dan Navarro

8:10Special Presentation

8:30Amélie Frank presents the

Distinguished Service Award to Mike Sonksen

8:50Wanda Coleman presents Eloise Klein Healy

with the George Drury Smith Award

9:00Special Presentation

9:50Raffle Prizes with Brendan Constantine

9:20Closing remarks from Richard Modiano

Tonight’s Program

CongratulationsEloise Klein Healy

Mike Sonksen

The Orloff Family

Congratulations

Eloise Klein HealyMike Sonksen

All the best,

EVE BRANDSTEIN'S

In gratitude for your inspirationand the sharing of your profoundtalent. Especially to those living

in Los Angeles.

Thank you,Maria Ruiz

Frie

nds

Friends Greetings to Our Honorees

Larry ColkerRuth & Marvin Farber

Nancy FultonBill Hickok

Melody KellogDoug Knott

Suzanne LummisHenry Morro

Sherman PearlGloria Vando

POETRYiNMOT!ON

Eloise Klein Healy

Mike Sonksen

PUNK HOSTAGE PRESS